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Thursday, September 21, 2006

How Random Is the iPod's Shuffle?

via The Wall Street Journal

Earlier this week, Mads Haahr ordered a customized iPod with "God Plays Dice" engraved on its back. Mr. Haahr -- a random-number enthusiast, lecturer in computer science at Trinity College in Dublin and keeper of the Web site Random.org, a popular source of random numbers -- intends to answer a question that has long bedeviled users of Apple's popular music player: Does the shuffle function really play users' songs in random order?
Link

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I work at a large Software company... Trust me, there is no way a computer script can generate a completely random algo. Its not logical.

Thats why I dont play cpu slots.
Truman

ProcessHouse said...

But, you don't really want a random sequence. For one thing, you don't want to repeat the same song twice in a row. For another, you don't want the same sequence of two songs in close succession.